With the advent of generative AI, AI applications are transforming and reshaping various industries and changing the way people work. Software development is no exception.
San Francisco and Tokyo-based startup Autify has created an autonomous AI agent for software quality assurance to help software engineers complete code quicker, streamline workflows, and increase productivity. In other words, it has created an AI QA engineer for software engineers.
Startup on Monday announced that it has completed a $13 million Series B funding and released a beta version of Zenness, an AI agent for software quality assurance, to customers in the U.S. The Series B funding brings the total amount raised to $30 million, which includes $24 million in equity and $6 million in debt financing.
Global Capital Partners and LG Technology Ventures led the latest round, along with existing backers World Innovation Lab (WIL), Salesforce Ventures, Archetype Ventures and Uncorrelated Ventures.
In 2016, two former software engineers, Ryo Chikazawa (CEO) and Sam Yamashita, co-founded Autify after experiencing first-hand the pain point of software test length. To address this issue, Autify has built a platform called Autify NoCode, which enables developers and QA teams to improve efficiency and enhance the software quality engineering process, ultimately saving time and resources.
NoCode serves users in Japan and South Korea who rely heavily on manual testing. Currently in beta, Autoify’s newly launched Xenes is specifically designed for US-based customers.
According to the company, Zenness “creates test cases by analyzing product requirement documents, writes automated test code and automatically maintains the test code.” The company claims that Zenness reduces the time taken to create test cases by up to 55%, a feature that makes it stand out in the market.
“Companies that are investing heavily in automation by writing code do not need to adopt no-code.”[low-code] Because they can code. However, they still suffer from a lack of resources,” Chikazawa said, adding that companies expect generative AI to make their work more productive. “With the launch of Zens, we can now capture even the first step of software quality assurance which is designing and creating test cases and we will be able to provide a comprehensive end-to-end solution for the entire QA process.”
Zene works like this: Users can upload their product requirement documents in a variety of formats, including .html, .pdf, .docx, and .md. The agent then generates a set of outlined test cases covering the product specifications. Users can edit these test cases to improve the accuracy of the following steps. After any edits, Zenes generates automated test code.
“We believe AI is not meant to replace humans. It is meant to enhance human potential so that we can be more creative. The software development process and its quality assurance will be redefined with generative AI,” Chikazawa said.
Chikazawa told TechCrunch that the startup will use the new capital to implement more AI capabilities to support customers’ software QA. In addition, the startup has partnered with LG CNS, LG Corp.’s IT services unit, to expand in the Korean market as well as its core markets, the US and Japan.
Autoify did not disclose the number of customers, but said it now offers its services in 16 countries, up from two in 2021. When it completed its Series AAutoify has B2C and B2B customers including DeNA, NEC, NTT Smart Communication, Yahoo, and Zozo. Its employee count has also grown from 30 to 100 in 2021.
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